Lean
by whereistruth
Summary: Yet another take on events after the season finale. Previously a two-parter, now continued, WIP. Lorelai thinks she needs to review her mothering skills and lifestyle; Luke thinks she just needs to accept help where help is offered. JJ.
1. Finding a Place to Go

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I have never before written a GG fic, so be kind.  I realize this "morning after" premise has been beaten to death, but it doesn't stop the scenes from unrolling in my brain and asking to be written down.  So now I subject you to it!  This will probably be a short piece, a two-parter.

CHAPTER ONE- **_Finding a Place to Go_**

            She didn't know where to go.

            That wasn't necessarily a new thing; after all, Lorelai Gilmore thrived on confusion.  She was certain if her life was ever simplified, it would simply… fall apart.

            But when so many things had changed—in seconds, how did that happen exactly?  Did the whole universe conspire to scramble things?—she felt more than just confusion.  She felt directionless.

            She hadn't felt so misdirected since she'd found herself pregnant and fed up with her overbearing parents.

            Lorelai let herself into the inn, her feet dragging wearily, her heart no longer in the spirit of opening.  What her parents and Jason hadn't been able to accomplish, a few shocking moments with her daughter had—she was, for the time being, exhausted in every possible way.

            She started up the stairs, wishing only to sleep, to lay down and have a rest in a room that wasn't hers, in a room someone else would make up in the morning.  In a room that didn't exist under the same roof as Dean's infidelity.

            The noise made her freeze with her hand on the banister, one foot higher than the other on the stairs.  A huffing noise, the sound of a breath exhaled in sleep, the sound of a person—a man—shifting dreams and positions. 

            _Jason, _Lorelai thought, her face hardening.  Her patience was worn to nonexistence, and Digger Stiles was the last person on earth—aside perhaps from Dean—whom she wanted to see. 

            She turned and stomped down the stairs, sadistically hoping to wake him.  What sort of lunatic slept in the lobby, anyhow?  It was bad enough he'd camped out in the small den all through dinner, but _sleeping _there? 

            Lorelai was going to clobber the hell out of him.

            She already had a hand raised as she trod heavily around the big armchair—

            And stopped, her hand drooping and her face softening.

            Luke.

            He had his chair angled so he could see the front door and the door from the kitchen, and even as she cursed herself for jumping to ridiculously romantic conclusions, Lorelai knew he'd fallen asleep waiting for her to come back.

            Her fingers itched to touch, to reach out and stroke over the soft hair only rarely visible, but she caught herself before she actually did it.  A man who chased a naked friend through the town square deserved a good night's sleep, she guessed.  And besides, if she woke him now, there would be questions.

            Yes, there would probably be good things, like Luke holding her and letting her pour out her current misery… but there would be questions, too, about what had upset her, about what exactly had happened earlier on the porch. 

            She wasn't ready to answer questions.  She'd opened an inn, alienated her parents yet _again_, broken up with an ex who had already been broken up with, kissed her best friend, and felt her heart break into a million pieces as she watched her daughter make a terrible mistake, so really, was it so much to ask to give her a bit of a rest? 

            Dragging a soft, woven throw off a settee, Lorelai covered Luke with it and felt her heart twinge with the sheer naturalness of the action.

            Yes.  There would be questions.

            So, instead of going back up the stairs to the room she and Rory were to have shared, beside the room Luke was to have slept in, Lorelai turned and walked out the front door, wondering where on earth there was left for her to go.

            His neck was broken.

            He wasn't really sure, but Luke was _fairly _certain you didn't have to be a doctor to diagnose your own broken neck.  The angle he'd slept at had buried a crick so deep in his neck he was sure paralysis was next.

            Stupid overstuffed chairs.

            He stood slowly, barely bit back a groan—he wasn't old enough to make noises when he got up, dammit—tried to take a few steps forward—

            And fell straight back on the chair when his feet tangled and his knees buckled, jerking his neck at the exact _opposite _angle of how he'd slept.

            So much for paralysis—he could certainly feel that, and it hurt like hell.

            His feet were tangled in a blanket, a soft, multicolored knickknack he'd last seen on the back of the settee across from him.

            Where in the hell had that come from?

            Broken neck forgotten, Luke tossed the blanket away and took the stairs two at a time, reaching Lorelai's room with a hand raised to knock.

            "She's not there."

            Patty stood outside her door in her bathrobe, arms crossed over her not-insignificant bosom, mouth pursed in a knowing moue.  "She came in around 2 this morning, turned right around and left."  It was on the tip of her tongue to say Lorelai had spent an awfully long time down in the foyer, doing heavens knew what, but Patty left it to herself.

            This was different, this dance between Luke and Lorelai.  Patty could pump Lorelai for all the information in the world about any of those other young bucks she'd dated.  But this was Luke, and in Patty's not-so-humble opinion, this was not to be toyed around with.

            This was _right, _and Patty would strike herself mute if she'd have any part in scaring either of them off.  God knew it had taken them long enough to get to the point where they were now, casting glances at each other like the whole world couldn't feel the sparks.           

            It made Patty wish to be young again, just a little.

            "Do you know where she went, Patty?"  Pride was easy to swallow when it involved Lorelai—how hadn't he seen that earlier?—and he asked without hesitation.

            For once, Patty didn't know, and she told him as much.  As she watched the temper of frustration boil, the carefully controlled emotions Luke held as he turned and went back down the stairs and out the front door, she fanned herself and rolled her eyes back toward Babette's door.

            Time to wake her up.

            He'd gone to her house, Sookie's house, and around the square twice when a nasty, niggling little thought wormed its way into his brain.

            What if she didn't _want _to be found?

            Ridiculous, he knew, to think a woman who thrived on attention had somehow secreted herself away somewhere on what was, professionally speaking, the biggest night of her life, but it was that thought that kept returning to his brain.

            _Besides, _the eternal cynic in Luke piped up, _You never saw where Jason went last night._

He wanted to scoff at the thought, to dismiss it as ridiculous, because the way she'd kissed him last night, the way she'd felt in his arms… well, it was simply impossible for him to juxtapose that Lorelai with a Lorelai who would stay out all night with a man she seemed to loathe.

            At a loss, confused, and miserable, Luke turned and headed to the place that had always been safe for him, had always been home. 

            It was nearly time to start getting things ready for the breakfast crowd anyway, even though he knew his crowd would be depleted, enjoying Sookie's breakfast at the inn.  And it was just as well, as he certainly was working himself into a mood that wouldn't be his usual sunny air of quality customer service.

            Luke reached the door of the diner, found it unlocked, and mentally started preparing the lecture he would give Cesar and Lane.

            The sound of the water running in his apartment hastened his steps, and Luke rolled his eyes.  Jess, no doubt, or Liz.  It seemed the two of them could neither announce their presence ahead of time or show up at a normal hour of the day.  "Jess, is that you?" he called, shouldering his way through the door and stopping with Liz's name on his lips.

            It wasn't Jess or Liz but Lorelai, standing at his sink and washing the dishes he hadn't yet gotten around to.


	2. Someone to Lean On

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The second part of the little two-part vignette I started.  It's not a closed-ended, complete saga or anything, but just a little interaction between my two favorite characters, the way I foresee things happening (even if that doesn't pan out).  This was sort of an exercise to see if I could write Luke and Lorelai in character, complete with the style of speaking… egads, haha.  Please read and enjoy—I thank you all for your encouragement and who knows, perhaps a plot bunny will bite me and I'll write something more at some point.

CHAPTER TWO- **_Someone to Lean On_**

            "Lorelai?"

            His voice startled her, sent suds flying on either side of the sink, her hands jerking in a defensive, jumpy gesture borne of little sleep and much stress.  She turned, her shadowed eyes wide and mouth slightly agape.  "God, Luke, maybe wear a bell next time instead of sneaking up.  I mean, what if I'd been drying a butcher knife, huh?"

            "It's my apartment," he noted dryly, absurdly pleased to see her there, no matter what the circumstances.  "What are you doing?"

            She'd been absorbed in her thoughts, as always, the soothing, repetitive action of scrub, rinse, scrub calming her nerves and allowing clearer thoughts to come through.  Well, relatively clearer—her mind was still barreling along like a freight train, and she could feel panic crowding in along the edges of her vision, panic along with fatigue and worry and a complete and utter sense of helplessness.

            It wasn't unusual for her to feel lost—she just had made a habit of keeping that particular tidbit to herself.  A competent mother—a _good _mother—always knew what she was doing, and Lorelai Gilmore had set out in motherhood with only two goals: to make her daughter love her and to escape the kind of criticism that had plagued her own childhood.

            A good mother was beyond reproach. 

            She was still working on that.

            "Well," she answered with a dry little huff of laughter, coming back to the present, "I was practicing to be in the circus, but I dropped my flaming ring of death down the sink and thought I'd go looking for it."

            Luke took a step toward her, a frown creasing his brow.  Something was off, something was wrong.  It wasn't just that she was wearing the same clothes she'd worn  yesterday, or that she had broken into his apartment to wash his dishes, it was something else.  And Luke was deathly scared that _something else _was him—that he was the problem, he was what was making her panic.

            Of course, that didn't make much sense, considering she'd come to his apartment, but still and all…

            He didn't want to lose her before he even got her.  He'd already done that too many times.

            "Lorelai," he said simply, holding a hand out to her, wanting to touch, the motion already reflex, already ingrained. 

            She skittered back like a nervous horse, eyes wide, and though the pained wince that sent through his eyes hurt her, as well, she couldn't seem to stop the motion.

            "Do you have anymore dirty dishes?" she asked, false lightness coloring her voice.  "Like in the diner?"

            "Cesar can take care of those.  It's his job."  What had happened, he wondered, between the time he'd gone after Kirk and now?  And moreover, how could he make it better for her? 

            "Yeah, but as long as I'm already elbow deep in Dawn, I may as well do the dishes.  I mean, I'm a master dishwasher, Luke.  If I didn't already have a job, I'd say you should hire me.  I hardly ever break anything."  She tried her usual flirtatious grin, felt it falter, and let it slide.

            "A job," he repeated, reaching out and grasping her elbows, determined to hang on whether she liked it or not.  "Would that explain why when I woke up this morning in _your _inn, you were here at _my _diner?"  Explanations—that sounded like a good place to start.  But at this proximity, with all her vulnerability showing, all Luke wanted was to hold her, to kiss her.  But she was stiff in his grasp, constantly moving, the fiery, sweet Lorelai of the evening before momentarily gone.

            "The inn!" she exclaimed, her hands now sliding down to his as she realized what she'd left behind.  The inn was at least the same, something she could grab onto, and she'd shirked all of her duties to… what?  Come here and wash dishes?  "How was your room last night?  Oh, wait… you didn't use your room, that's right, just another thing I ruined for someone.  I'll make it up to you, okay?  Complimentary stay whenever you want." 

            Luke smiled faintly, feeling a little normal ground steady between them.  "Who said I stayed up because of you?" he jibed gently, seeing a little more color seep into her cheeks.  Now if he could just get her to sit down…

            "Well," Lorelai retorted, hearing Rory's words ricocheting through her head, "In addition to being a horrible mother, I'm also incredibly self-involved.  Hadn't you noticed?"  He drew her to him just a bit, as though to share his strength with her.  God, how she needed it, now more than ever.

            "Horrible mother?"  Would there ever come a day, Luke wondered, when he wouldn't feel the need to repeat everything she said simply to understand it?

            "You kissed me," she stated by way of answering, because right now, with him so close and her brain so far, it was the only thing Lorelai could think of. 

            Luke shut his eyes momentarily, trying to track the non sequitur as best he could.  He needed to start getting up earlier in the morning if he was ever going to come close to matching the speed at which she changed subjects.  "I did.  So?"

            _So?_ Lorelai thought.  So… everything.  How dare he sound so nonchalant when he'd kissed her and turned her so completely around that she'd still been floating, just a little, when she'd caught Rory with Dean?

            "So it was a bad idea, that's what," she said defensively, pushing away from him, her jaw jutting out.  "You don't want to kiss me, Luke."  And all her fears and insecurities came bubbling up before she could stop them, all the things she'd been thinking while washing those dishes, all the accusations she'd heard in her daughter's voice, all the accusations she'd ever leveled at herself and all of the shortcomings her mother had none-too-gently reminded her of came crashing to the forefront. 

            "I'm… I'm a bad person and I've been a bad example to Rory.  I shouldn't have a family, because I couldn't even get along with the one I had, and then I went and made my own, and you don't want that, because you've already had bad relationships.  And besides, I'm flighty, just ask my mother, who is taking my daughter away from me this summer, and maybe she should, you know, because I apparently made a wrong turn somewhere, and did you see my parents there at the Inn?  They came, they accused, and they left without saying a word about the place."  She uttered a thin 'ha' of hysterical laughter, and then her eyes widened on a memory.  "Oh, oh, and oh… you said it a long time ago, Luke, you said, you told Rory she didn't want to end up like me, and you were right, but it doesn't matter, because it happened anyway even though I tried to help—"

            He grabbed her shoulders and shook, one hard, brisk shake that sent her tired curls shifting around her shoulders, and that shook was all it took to bring the tears to her eyes.  "Stop," he commanded roughly, every self-deprecation she spouted digging at him just as much as at her. 

            If he loved her, shouldn't he have seen at least _some _of this?  No matter what had set it off—and he intended to find out what it had been—shouldn't he have seen some of those thoughts lurking behind those gorgeous blue eyes?

            Or had he just seen what he wanted to?

            "Whatever I said a long time ago, Lorelai, I couldn't have meant, because I don't even _remember _saying that, dammit."  He stroked his hands down her arms and wondered where to start.  "You're not a bad person," he said lamely.  Everything that came to mind just sounded completely inadequate, and so he gave the simplest comfort he had to offer.  "Tell me what's wrong.  Let me help you."

            "Don't you ever get tired of helping me?" she wondered aloud.  "Stupid Lorelai, who can't even fix her own windows or shovel her own sidewalk or… pay for her own stupid inn.  Haven't you helped enough?"

            It was his turn to push her away, to do so physically even as he felt her do it emotionally.  "I don't know, have I helped at all?  You don't ever _just _ask anyone for help, Lorelai.  You ask someone for help and then you make it into a business deal with your papers and your promises and your IOUs and then you shove them away and then you feel okay."  He took a deep breath.  "Then you still feel independent.  You won't _let _anyone just help you."

            Lorelai felt her eyes widen in disbelief.  From all corners tonight, and now from Luke, too?  It was too damned much.  "That's the Gilmore way!" she exclaimed bitterly, crossing her arms over her chest.

            Luke barked a short, cynical laugh and raked his hand through his hair, missing his ball cap.  "For someone who spends so much time scorning the Gilmore way, you sure use it when it suits you."

            Nothing could have stung her more than his statement, and nothing could have stung him more than the hurt in her eyes.  They stood in silence, contemplating each other, one knowing exactly what had gone on and completely clueless as to what to do about it, the other left in the dark but knowing exactly what to do about it, anyway.

            His father had been a steadfast man, a predictable man, an _honorable _man, and Luke had looked up to that his whole life.  He had aspired to that his whole life.

            So he reached out to her despite his fear of rejection, and though she resisted him, he put his arms around her and closed his eyes.  "You don't have to tell me what happened, Lorelai.  Just… lean on me for once, okay?"  _Need me, _he wanted to say, feeling his heart ache in his chest.  "It doesn't matter what happened, things will get better."

            And though it was hard for him to believe his own words when he felt the sobs start to wrack through her body, he kissed the top of her head and prayed he could help her, prayed he could do his best for her.

            And when she finally spoke, uncustomary tears dried up, he knew no matter what was to come, he could honor at least one request.

            "You got any coffee?"


	3. The Accidental Chapter

Author's Note: I hadn't meant to continue this, but it stuck in the back of my mind and after the positive reception it got, my brain kept clamoring to continue this.  So now, what was once a short two-parter is now… a growing GG fic.  Enjoy.

CHAPTER THREE- **_The Accidental Chapter_**

            She'd made it only halfway through her first cup when she started to nod off.

            That, Luke thought, was a sure sign of dire circumstances.  Nothing—not even sleep—stood between Lorelai Gilmore and her coffee.

            He slid her mug away from her, across the well-used wood of his kitchen table, and watched with a mixture of pity and fascination as her eyes drooped and her head nodded jerkily.  "Up," he said gruffly, knowing he had to start in the diner soon, and for the first time since he'd opened the diner, hating it. 

            She obeyed, mumbling under her breath.  "Luke's a bad daddy and took away my coffee," she muttered, her full lips smirking saucily despite her misery, temporarily swamped only by her exhaustion.  Was there somewhere she had to be?  Somewhere she was needed, where she had obligations?  It was hard to remember in the whirl of last night's events, with all those mental snapshots of Luke and Jason and Rory and Luke and Dean and Luke…

            And it was just the right temperature in Luke's apartment, really, and the whole place smelled like coffee, and what Lorelai wanted more than anything was to curl up on the couch that smelled like Luke and Luke's coffee and sleep.

            So she did.

            He gave himself ten minutes, just ten, to sit in the stiff kitchen chair and watch her drop into sleep as children often did—no tossing and turning, just a tuck, a curl, and the peaceful slide into rhythmic breathing.

            He wanted so badly to know what was wrong, and though it felt a little wrong to be relieved, he'd determined he wasn't the problem.

            If he had been, would she have come here, to his place?

            Luke was still looking over his shoulder at her as he closed the door and went out to the diner.

            "Sookie, you take one step back there and I'll tell everyone you buy damaged produce." 

            Luke stood poised behind the counter on his toes, ready to intercept the bubbly chef if she took one step toward his apartment.  She glared at him through customarily cheery eyes, and he wondered what his day had come to.

            The first few hours had been fine; all out-of-towners, simple orders.  Most of the locals—his regulars—had been stuffed and sated with Sookie's breakfast over at the inn, and so he'd had a quiet morning with no disruptions.  And since Cesar was working, it gave him ample opportunity to slip back and check on Lorelai every hour or so.

            Every hour, that was, until ten—checkout time at the Dragonfly Inn. 

            "I called you and told you she was here, Sookie, now leave her the hell alone," Luke said, pushing past Sookie to wipe the empty tables off.  Couldn't someone—anyone—come in and distract him?

            "But Luke," Sookie whined, in a near-panic.  "Lorelai has the thank-you cards.  And she has to be there to speak to the guests, they're her _guests.  _I don't speak, Luke!  I cook."  She sighed and tried a different tack, changing her tone to one so sugary it could have sweetened her peach sauce all by itself.  "You understand how it is.  We're culinary artists, we don't _do _manners, we don't _do _hand-shaking.  We cook, they like, we go on."

            "Nice try," he muttered, slapping both hands on the counter.  "What part of 'She had a bad night' don't you understand?"

            And what part, he wondered, of _This is the first time I've ever had her to myself?_

_            That _was a revelation he'd definitely have to work on later.

            "How about this, Sookie?  We'll go by her house, we'll find the thank-you cards, you will leave."  Everything about it, especially the leaving part, made Luke a happy man. 

            It should have been that easy, to tell Cesar to keep an eye on the diner, with the implicit indication he should keep an eye on Lorelai as well.  Sookie kept her peace all the way over to Lorelai's house, though she desperately wanted to know what had happened.  It was comforting, of course, to know her best friend was physically fine—but how had she ended up at Luke's place instead of at the inn? 

            But if there was anyone Sookie trusted with Lorelai, it was Luke.  She just wasn't about to admit that to Luke himself.  He'd get a bigger ego than he already had, and then there would just be no dealing with him at all.

            He tried the door and found it, unsurprisingly, unlocked.  "Anyone here?" he called out gruffly, wondering where Rory could be.  Lorelai without Rory was a rare sight, and for Lorelai to have been out all night without her daughter's knowledge seemed just beyond Luke's range of belief.  But there was no answer from the Gilmore house, and so he beckoned Sookie into the house.  "Knowing Lorelai, they're under that pile of junk on the kitchen table," he gestured.

            The shrill ring of the phone made Luke wince and Sookie pause, eyes wide, but he merely shook his head.  There was a machine; it would pick up.

            "… Speak if you must," Lorelai's voice finished up the wry greeting, making Luke smile.  It had been that voice for him, that woman, for so long.  It had been just that tone, that sarcasm, matching his own dry humor remark for remark. 

            And then the voice on the other line dashed cold water over Luke, bringing back a memory he shouldn't have, a thought he shouldn't have held onto for so long. 

            "Rory, it's Dean.  Pick up the phone, Rory, I know you have to be there, I've been calling all morning."  His voice was panicked, strained, and Luke closed his eyes and recalled a young man struggling with feelings he shouldn't have had, a young man just on the cusp of devoting his life to another woman.

            _Damn it, Dean, _Luke thought, wondering what this was all about.

            "Rory, we need to talk," Dean persisted.  "Listen, last night was great—wonderful, perfect, even—but…" He took a deep breath, shaky on his end of the phone.  "I don't know what to do, Rory.  I don't know how to tell Lindsey."

            "Oh, God," Sookie's voice warbled miserably from the doorway of the kitchen.  "It's gotta be something else," she said, clutching the box of cards to her chest and looking wide-eyed between Luke and the answering machine.  "It just sounds bad, that's all, but it's perfectly innocent."

            But when Luke looked at the machine and saw the number blinking on the display—19—he wondered how innocent things really could have been.

            Nineteen messages, and Luke was willing to bet all of them—or nearly all—were Dean.

_            You told Rory she didn't want to end up like me, and you were right, but it doesn't matter, because it happened anyway…_

That voice of hers again, only this time miserable and half-hysterical. 

            Luke scrubbed a hand over his face, glancing up at Sookie.  Her usually benevolent expression had been replaced by one very close to grieving, her eyes wide and tearful as she looked at the answering machine as though it was the source of her anguish.

            Luke wasn't aggrieved; he was torn.  A full half of him wanted to find Dean, to demand answers, to beat the kid to a bloody pulp if he'd done what Luke feared he'd done. 

            But a full half of him yearned for Lorelai with the understanding he hadn't been able to gain from her that morning, and it was her name that fell from his lips as he left her house at a run back to his diner.


	4. Waking Up and Walking Away

CHAPTER FOUR- **_Waking Up and Walking Away_**

            She listened to the messages only once, deleting each of the fifteen messages he'd sent, her self-loathing growing with every word that bounded tinnily from the small answering machine.

            How was it, Rory wondered, a machine so small could hold a secret so big?

            She'd slept like the dead, cried herself into exhaustion with her mother sitting by her bed, stroking her hair.  She remembered Lorelai telling her everything would be all right, that it always was, then the faraway, intermittent ring of the telephone, only barely disturbing her sleep.

            And now she saw the reason for all those rings in the night, in the morning, during the day.

            Fifteen calls from Dean, and four from Jason Stiles.

            Rory would have felt sorry for her mother if she didn't feel so damned numb.

            But numb or no, it was her mother she first thought of after listening to all those messages from a married man with whom she'd made the biggest mistake of her life so far.

            She needed to see her mom, so she headed for the inn.

            "Now there's a fine sight to behold." Walking around the square with Babbette, taking just a little fresh air, Patty clutched her hands to her chest and watched Luke run full-tilt across the town square toward his diner, Sookie bustling along at a lagging pace behind him, a stack of cards waving in one hand.

            "You know," Babbette said, narrowing her eyes, "It seems like just yesterday he was still playin' football at the high school. Made all the girls sit up and take notice, that one."

            "I wonder why he's running," Patty said slyly, casting a knowing glance at her friend.

            "Maybe he found somethin' worth running for," Babbette laughed, and they shared the moment, companionable, and wishing the best for the woman they'd come to love, the woman who had come so long ago with hurt in her eyes and the first tastes of freedom in her mouth.

            Lorelai Gilmore had come a long way. Now she just had to stand still and let the rest come to her.

            "Move," Luke commanded one of his customers, not giving half a damn for customer service right this second. Chances were they were out-of-towners, anyway, and they were never planning on coming back. "Lorelai!"

            "She's gone." Cesar had rehearsed nearly a hundred different ways to deliver that particular news to his boss—it didn't take Albert Einstein to know Luke was crazy about her, and after all, the lady had spent the night, and more power to the boss for that—but he figured the best way was to be direct.

            He was questioning the wisdom of that decision as Luke's face turned a dangerous shade of magenta.

            "Gone," Luke repeated, and a fool would have taken that flat, quiet tone at face value. Cesar was no fool, and he heard the anger underneath.

            "Hey, don't look at me. Lorelai doesn't take orders very well." Cesar shifted from foot to foot and looked at Luke. Thinking only of his own survival, he pointed out the door. "She went that way. Took one of your coffee mugs, too—"

            Luke cursed under his breath and wondered if there would ever be a time when he wasn't chasing Lorelai some way or another. He headed back out the doors, shoving the same customer he'd accosted on his way in and nearly mowing Sookie down.

            "I can't keep up with you!" she said plaintively, fanning herself with the stack of cards. "Where's Lorelai?"

            "Gone," Luke muttered, "And if you can't keep up with me, don't try."

            She was still spluttering when he walked to the next corner, then broke into a jog.

            She'd cook something, Sookie thought desperately. She could cook something for Jackson, or something for Rory, or make some tiramisu for Lorelai.

            Anything but rocky road cookies, she thought, heading for the comfort of her kitchen. Anything but rocky road cookies for that bastard of a bag boy.

            "You want to speak with Dean?" Lindsey's voice bounced into a higher register with her disbelief, her ponytail swinging saucily as she tilted her head at Lorelai, eyes narrowed. "What is this about?"

            Lorelai blew a sigh through clenched teeth and took a deep swallow from the mug she'd thoughtlessly lifted from Luke's. She'd been barely awake when the ugly truth of the previous night's events had hit her, and though her first yearning was for blood, or at least answers, none of those things came without coffee to fuel them.

            "It's about some work Dean did," she said, thinking it wasn't entirely a lie.  "Is he here?"

            "He's at work," Lindsey said slowly.

            "Oh!" Lorelai laughed, rolling her eyes. "Are you sure about that?" She started to say something, started to let her emotions get ahead of her mouth, started to gesture wildly with the heavy porcelain mug when it was lifted from her hand and held in a large, steady one.

            "I'll take that," Luke said, anchoring his free hand around Lorelai's bicep.  "Excuse us," he addressed Lindsey in the politest tones he could muster. He felt for the girl, and probably a lot more than Lorelai realized at the moment.  If things were as they seemed—and judging by Lorelai's reaction, things were precisely how they seemed—Luke had been in Lindsey's shoes not too long before.

            "What are you doing?" he hissed between his teeth as the young woman shut the door and left them alone on the street. "Are you insane?"

            Lorelai tugged her arm away from him, glowering and rubbing at the spot where he'd had his hand. He hadn't hurt her—it wasn't likely he had it in him to do that—but she was definitely none too happy about being caught. "Yes," she said defensively. "I am insane, and if you didn't know that, you haven't been paying attention to my behavior every single day I come into your diner." She'd woken up with a good, healthy dose of anger, the same kind of anger that had once driven her to the market after the exact same boy, and it had been the exact same man who calmed her down.

            She didn't want to be calm. There was too much room for thought there.

            "Give me my damned coffee," she said petulantly, taking it away from him and nearly spilling the hot liquid over her hand and arm.  "Why are you here?" 

            It was a good question, a reasonable one, she thought.  It didn't matter how relieved she was to see him, how relieved she'd _always _been to see him—

            _Except for these past few days, in which you haven't been relieved, but nervous and excited and fumbling and idiotic…_

—she still wanted to know why he was there. 

            "To get you, why else would I be here?"  Luke could see the wheels turning in her head as he drew her away from the house and back toward the inn, wanting a comfort zone, a neutral spot for when she figured out…

            "How the hell did you know to come here?" she asked, her voice growing shrill.  He _knew, _dammit, somehow he knew.  And if he knew, other people knew.

            She'd wanted to keep this one secret for Rory, in this town that held no secrets, she'd wanted no one to know this.  Especially not the people who loved Rory the most.

            "I just thought you might have headed this way, okay?" he shouted back, definitely not wanting to tell her what he suspected here, on the street, in the middle of town.  "If there's something going on, I'm not going to force it from you, Lorelai.  If you want to tell me, you will."

            She blinked at him owlishly then rolled her eyes.  "Well, there's nothing going on, so I don't have to want to tell you anything.  I'm going back to the inn, and then I'm going home."  She could feel herself pushing at him, pushing as she always did, but it needed to be her and Rory right now.  Rory needed her, and anyone else was just going to get in the way. 

            So she broke away from him and walked in the opposite direction, her steps long and measured as she retraced her steps in reverse.

            Past the diner, to the inn, and then she would go home.

            If only time could go backwards so easily.

            Luke closed his eyes and blew out a breath.  _Dammit, Lorelai, can't you ever take a hand up when it's offered?_

If she helped Rory, then who was helping Lorelai?

            "You still have my coffee mug!" he yelled down the street, and found it didn't make him feel one bit better.


	5. Go West, Young Woman

CHAPTER FIVE – Go West, Young Woman  
  
She almost passed right by the inn, almost didn't stop, but guilt and the many years of trying to make that particular dream come true had Lorelai swinging through the front doors and promising herself she would only take a minute—just a minute—make her explanations, set things right, and then leave.  
And the minute she set foot in the eerily quiet inn, she heard shouting from the kitchen.  
"I don't want you to make me something, I want you to tell me how you found out!" Rory's voice, uncharacteristically loud, uncharacteristically angry. She sounded, Lorelai thought with a twinge of heartache, as she had when she'd come home from Patty's studio, indignant and insulted at the idea she'd done something with Dean.  
Now she had done something with Dean, and here was that voice again, those two high, feverish spots of color in her cheeks, the one in the middle of her forehead. That voice directed, in all places, at Sookie.  
Sookie held a chocolate-covered spoon in one trembling hand, her eyes wide and wet. "Found out what?" she asked tremulously, but the damage was already done. She hadn't meant any harm—she'd just been trying to comfort Rory when the girl had walked in looking tired and completely heartbroken—but of course, as per usual, it had come out all wrong and she'd mentioned Dean, and things had just went downhill from there.  
The other members of the kitchen staff had scattered, Lorelai noted with a weird, distant, separate part of her brain, and she wondered how much they'd heard. Now it was just the circle of them—Rory, Sookie, Lorelai, and Luke. This, Lorelai thought, already stepping toward her daughter, this was very nearly a family. It was more or less the family Rory had had for so long.  
But now she looked very much alone, and both young and old at the same time, and when she whirled on Lorelai, her eyes bright and accusatory, she looked like a child throwing a tantrum and a woman on the verge of something very big.  
"You told them." The three words, rasped in a voice wounded by a night of tears, weren't a question, but a statement, and before Lorelai could answer, Rory was already shaking her head. "For once you couldn't figure out something on your own, couldn't keep it to yourself?" She had depended on her mother for just this one thing, to be the adult just this once.  
Lorelai grabbed her daughter's arm, partly to keep her in place and partly to assure herself that this fuming, railing girl was real, was her own. "Rory, calm down. I didn't tell them anything, and I know just as much as you do about how they might have found out. Just... quit with the Linda Blair, we'll go home and figure this out." She shot Luke and Sookie a hard look before looking back at Rory. "Minus the audience."  
Rory jerked away, not even bothering to rub the spot on her arm her mother had kept a tight grip on, her brain trying to calculate. How many people knew? How many people were staying in the inn, how many kitchen staff members? How many people would each of them call, and how many beyond that?  
Everyone would know.  
Everyone probably already did.  
"I can't stay here!" she burst out, throwing her hands into the air. The kitchen felt tiny, the inn itself even tinier, and the town of Stars Hollow suddenly felt stifling.  
She could feel, now, why Jess had wanted to get out.  
"I'm going to Dad's," Rory said in a rush, the inspiration so sudden she barely had time to decipher it in her mind before it was out of her mouth. "I can't believe you told them."  
"Rory," Luke started, holding out a hand, torn in two, wanting to help, needing to, but having no idea how.  
"Stay out of it, Luke," Lorelai commanded, her eyes on Rory. "You think Christopher's going to be any more helpful?"  
"He's at least not going to tell everyone he knows!" Rory burst out, her eyes now filled with tears. "It's so easy for you to judge, isn't it? It's all so easy for you. I don't find guys the way you do, Mom, I'm not the six-month commitment-phobe who knows she can replace the last guy with a new one." She didn't see Luke's face blanch, didn't see his wince, because she was focused on her mother now.  
It needed to be just the two of them, so it was just the two of them.  
"I don't expect you to understand what it's like to need someone to care about you, because you always have that."  
That did what nothing else could: It stunned Lorelai into speechlessness.  
"Oh, honey," Sookie said softly, sadly, and no one knew to whom she was speaking.  
Finally, when Lorelai did speak, it was faltering, stilted, and she could already see Rory turning to leave. "How are you going to get out there, huh? Thumb a ride? Drive all that way? And what are you going to tell your father when you get out there? Honey, you have to think these things through." And though all those things were true, Lorelai was also desperate, so desperate, for her daughter to stay.  
But even pragmatism didn't faze the girl as it usually did.  
"Nice implication, Mom," Rory said, her brain whirling, unable to stop on a single thought and follow it through. All she could focus on was hurt, and fear, the fear of everyone knowing what she'd done. Pointed fingers and disappointed whispers.  
Failure.  
"Since I clearly didn't think everything else through, right?" Rory finished her train of thought faintly.  
Lorelai huffed in clear disbelief. "I—I just want you to stay," she said honestly. "You can't leave now."  
"You can't stop me," Rory retorted, and felt tired, so tired all over again, as though she hadn't already slept all the night and half the day away.  
And that, Lorelai thought, was pragmatic.  
She couldn't stop her daughter, and what kind of mother would she be if she tried?

Two days was all it took, two short days, forty-eight hours. Most of those forty-eight hours were spent on the phone, Rory calling Emily, calling Richard, calling Lane, and calling Christopher with vague explanations and half-truths. Calling the airport with rates and information and destination. Studied avoidance of the ringing phone, of any contact with Dean.  
And many of those forty-eight hours were spent, on Lorelai's part, begging her daughter to stay, sometimes with words, sometimes with actions, and sometimes with total, uncharacteristic silence.  
She understood, now, how her mother could have felt all those years ago. Helplessness all but swamped Lorelai, the complete inability to be of any aid to her daughter. For the first time in her daughter's life, Lorelai did not know what to do for her, with her, or to her.  
So she stood forty-eight hours later in the airport, her arms wrapped tightly around her as she watched her daughter shift nervously from one foot to the other, obviously impatient for her flight to be called.  
It's not running away, Lorelai insisted to herself, taking in her daughter with wide eyes. Finally, she reached forward and hugged her daughter instead of hugging herself, wondering if a few days were enough for her daughter to have lost so much weight, or if she'd just always been this tiny, this delicate.  
Rory did not put her arms around her mother—could not, since Lorelai had trapped Rory's arms tight to her sides—but she turned her face into the crook of her mother's neck with something akin to both relief and grief.  
"Tell me I didn't drive you away," Lorelai whispered fiercely into Rory's ear. "Tell me I didn't turn into Emily all over again and suffocate you and judge you and mock your sense of style and force you into leaving to the first place available."  
Rory shook her head as best she could, the single motion a negation. No, she'd driven herself away, and she couldn't stay in the same town as Dean until she'd sorted things out. So she shook her head, and as they called her flight, she whispered, "I know you didn't tell them."  
Then she was off and running, her carryon caught up in one hand, and Lorelai didn't give a damn who was in the airport or what they thought of her, and she waved her arms above her head and yelled, "I love you, Lorelai Gilmore!"  
And as she heard the words echoed back to her from Rory, Rory who looked so much like Christopher, Rory who was even now headed to Christopher, Lorelai smiled and wondered if she could save the cry for back in the Jeep.  
She turned, knowing she'd have to hurry if she wanted to spill no tears in the airport, and Lorelai gasped.  
And her tears would not wait any longer as Luke stepped forward and pulled her to him, already apologizing in soft, private tones in the loud, public place because he didn't have a handkerchief.


	6. Constant Reminder

CHAPTER SIX - **_Constant Reminder_**

            Lorelai insisted on driving herself home though he offered to take her—"The least I can do after sobbing all over that fashionably timeless flannel shirt is drive myself home—" because she needed the time. 

            When was the last time she'd needed that shoulder?  Really and truly needed someone? 

            _Well, there was the time when you needed money for the inn, every time you needed things to be fixed around the house, when you needed someone to help you find a lost baby chick, for God's sake.  When _didn't _you really and truly need someone?_

_            When didn't you really and truly need Luke?_

Lorelai glanced in her rearview mirror as she took the exit toward Stars Hollow, seeing him follow in his big, dependable truck—

            _Oh, that's right, you needed Luke and Luke's truck to help move Rory into Yale…_

And she couldn't help the smile that crossed her lips, despite herself, the wistful, half-amazed smile. 

            "Huh," she uttered, a half-aloud chuff of disbelief. 

            She'd wanted to be angry to see him there in the airport, intruding on what should have been a very personal moment, a moment for her and Rory alone, and then Lorelai alone.  But she hadn't been angry, no matter how hard she'd tried.  She'd been a _little _angry that he hadn't brought coffee…

            But no, overall she'd just been glad to have those arms around her.

            It seemed wrong to feel that way in light of what her daughter was going through, but the one thing Lorelai had now that Rory had gone to her father was time.

            And in that time, she would have to think things through.

            Like what on earth had Luke been thinking, kissing her like that?

            And what were they going to do about the kitchen staff at the inn…

            The Inn!  Lorelai slammed on her brakes, wincing as she heard Luke lock his own brakes behind her, the short, staccato blare of his horn following close behind.  She looked in her rearview mirror again and saw him starting to get out of his truck, concern written all over his face.  She stuck her head out the window and looked back at him, shaking her head.  "No, sorry!" she yelled, over-enunciating on the off chance that he was reading her lips.  "Everything's fine!  I just had an idea and I can't think and fiddle with that light bulb above my head at the same time."

            And when he gave her a perplexed, exasperated look and shook his head, Lorelai thought that any other woman would be a goner.

            But not, she told herself sternly, Lorelai Gilmore.  Because being a goner wasn't convenient for Lorelai Gilmore right now.

            She smiled anyway as she made her way into town.

            He understood that any woman in Lorelai's situation would need time.  Luke even understood that any woman in Lorelai's situation would need space. 

            But Lorelai wasn't any woman, and Luke gave her exactly one day after Rory's departure to wallow in her self-pity and throw herself into the inn.  One day, twenty-four hours, and then he dove back in.  Luke Danes did not start a job without finishing it, and Luke Danes was not finished with this job.

            Luke was not about to let Lorelai forget about him.

            Oh, sure, she'd been in and out of the diner for coffee a few times, but each time she'd been caffeinated to the gills, flying in and out of the diner on a wave of that exotic mix of Colombian blend and some spicy, sexy perfume that messed with Luke's nose and made him completely incapable of cooking for five minutes after she left.

            When she'd come in for an evening cup after Rory's departure, Luke had given Cesar a look that plainly promised bad, bad things if Cesar dared make a comment about Luke's unfocused behavior.

            So, he simply hadn't been able to settle for her flitting in and out of the coffee shop—damned Dragonfly, indeed—and the morning after Rory left, he'd risen early, made a few small arrangements, and had gone to the diner with a small smile on his face.

            A muffin bouquet. 

            She would have laughed any other time, but she was lonely, dammit.  With Rory gone, the house was too empty, the only calls hang-ups who couldn't be from anyone but Dean.  She'd gone to bed insanely early the evening before, exhausted from telling her daughter goodbye, exhausted from studiously avoiding Luke, exhausted from the hour-long cleaning frenzy she'd gone into, scrubbing Rory's room from top to bottom, eager to rid it of any trace of Dean.

            The bastard.

            She'd woken up this morning, really and truly relishing that moment of fuzziness that came from a long night's sleep.  For that moment, she didn't remember that Rory was gone or anything that had came before.  It just seemed like another day in Stars Hollow.

            And then she'd fully woken up, her brain yammering for coffee and her heart clamoring for Rory.  She stumbled into the kitchen and found what Luke had left her, and her heart stopped its clamor and simply stared.

            It was beautiful, really, a conglomeration of muffins and biscotti, forming what really and truly looked like a wonderfully tasty cellophane-wrapped bouquet. 

            "Oooh, goodies," Lorelai said, poking her finger at what she thought was Sookie's creation.  The note fell out from between two muffins, written on a scrap of lined paper with worn edges that could only have come from one place.

            Lorelai closed her eyes, her fingers clasping the note, and she could see Luke and that ever-present notepad he carried, shoving it wherever it would best hold, fraying the edges and crumpling the paper.

            _These won't be any good if you don't have any coffee to go with them._

He hadn't signed it—and had he really needed to?  She sighed and, thinking herself a fool, tucked the note aside for later perusal.

            She needed _something _to take her mind off things.

            So she took a shower and headed to Luke's.

            If she'd seen what was ahead, she wouldn't have gone in.  But Lorelai was too busy thinking of everything else to look around, preparing herself for the act that was about to follow.  She took a deep breath, shoved through the doors of the nearly empty diner, and cheerily greeted the first person she saw.

            "Hey, Kirk, how's it goin'?" she asked, wondering in the back of her mind if he knew Rory was gone, if he knew _why _Rory was gone.  "Did you and Lulu have a good time the other night?  We tried to set things up all nice and romantic for ya, but Michel said there was some problem with the sconces.  Never found them a turn-on myself, but hey, you need somewhere to anchor the handcuffs!"  She laughed and hit his shoulder, actually finding humor in the pensive look on his face until she saw he wasn't looking at her at all, but behind her.

            "Kirk?"

            He jerked himself and looked up at her, eyebrows tugged almost comically low, hooding his eyes.  "Lorelai, I know you tend to be a bit of a lone wolf, an independent thinker, a—"

            "Nutcase in the woods cooking bombs in a shack.  I got it, Kirk, skip to the chase."  She wanted to turn and look behind her, where she could now hear low voices, but at the same time, she didn't want to.  Oh, how much she didn't want to.

            "Well," he said, standing and patting her shoulder with his perennially awkward air.  "If you need anything, or if Rory does, you just let me know."  He scurried out of the diner like a man fleeing danger, and Lorelai turned slowly on her heel to survey the threat.

            She felt bile rise in her throat, blood rush to her head.  She clenched her hands into fists and walked stiff-legged across the floor, trying to count to ten in her head.  She'd never been very good at math, when it came to that.

            "I don't know where she is," Luke insisted in a low voice, his eyes shifting to Lorelai.  He'd seen the moment she'd walked in, seen her and heard her, his sensors for her going full blast.

            But he'd had a bit of a handful.

            "Come on, Luke, I know that's a lie!" Dean said, throwing his hands in the air.  "You and Lorelai are as thick as thieves!"

            "Speaking of people who steal things," Lorelai chirped, her voice brittle as she rapped one balled-up fist into Dean's big, stupid shoulder.  "Is there something I can do for you, Narcolepsy Boy?"  She hadn't mentioned that incident in a long time, but now seemed to be the time to be petty, to be snide, and she lowered her voice for the next barb.  "Though I have to commend you, you didn't seem to have any trouble straying… I mean… _staying _awake this time."

            Luke groaned, rubbing his eyes.  Why did all things have to culminate in his diner?  There was a perfectly good town square out front.

            But he liked her here, where he could keep his eye on her.

            "Dean was just leaving," Luke said by way of explanation, taking the younger man by the arm and escorting him to the door.  To an outside observer, it would have looked chummy, even pleasant.  But Dean gritted his teeth as Luke wrapped one strong hand around his bicep and squeezed unmercifully. 

            Taking a little abuse from Luke seemed fair considering the fear he had of Lorelai, so Dean said nothing, rubbing his arm and shooting one glance through the windows at the one woman left in Stars Hollow who could bring his whole world crashing down.

            Lorelai watched him with uncharacteristically cold blue eyes, watched like a hawk until he was out of eyesight, and then turned to Luke, who stood beside her.  "It's too bad you didn't squeeze a little harder," she said.  "You could have broken his arm."

            "I could have broken his neck," Luke responded automatically, then reached out to her, brushing his knuckles over the shadows under her eyes.

            She stepped back, as he'd fully expected her to, and they spoke simultaneously.

            "I could use that coffee."

            "How about some coffee?"


	7. Small Town Timing

CHAPTER SEVEN- **_Small Town Timing_**

            She wasn't accustomed to silence, and the diner, now in that first hour when most people were at work, was very silent.  Usually, Lorelai knew, she herself was filling that silence, chattering to Rory or Luke or anyone who would listen, and occasionally that silence would be broken by Rory talking about her plans for the day ahead.

            But now, the lone occupant at the long counter, Lorelai had nothing to say, and found that was all right.  The silence was comfortable, in a weird, sort of way.  She much preferred this silence, watching Luke wipe off the counter in long, steady strokes, than the silences that sometimes prevailed at the long table at her parents' home.  Her sips fell into a rhythm, and Lorelai found herself concentrating, of all things, on Luke's hands, moving back and forth and back and forth over the counter.

            It made for a nice distraction, after all.  It was certainly better than thinking about the big, cheating, loutish, virginity-stealing, amoral _goon _Luke had thrown out.

            _Back to the hands, _she told herself, taking down a gulp of coffee just a bit too fast.

            Had she ever noticed before how nice his hands were?  How they looked strong and capable and completely harmless?

            _They sure didn't feel harmless when they were all over you the other night, did they? _

            Lorelai choked on the coffee she was swallowing and wondered how a woman her age could lose control of her hormones over a man she'd known for years.

            Luke looked up at the sputtering noise she made, then rolled his eyes a little.  After all, it wouldn't do to look too soft.  She'd had too many pushovers, too many weak excuses for men with bigger bank accounts than brains and who had never had to lift a finger for anything in their lives.  It had never once failed to astound him that a woman so in touch with her own strength and her own ability, a woman who had rebuilt herself by sheer elbow grease and nonstop chatter, could end up with men who had never once worked with their hands.

            It had never once failed to make him jealous, and as he stood at the counter, Luke unconsciously curled his fingers into his palms to hide the calluses.

            What was he thinking, trying to aspire to her?

            The bell over the door rang and he hastily shoved the thoughts away along with the towel, taking his order pad out of his pants.  If they didn't know what they wanted, they'd get a few minutes' reprieve, and he was back to stand watch.

            Luke looked at his newest patron and snapped his fingers between his fingers.

            Did anything happen normally in Stars Hollow?  Luke thought not; it was too small a town, too tiny a place for things to progress with any normal sort of timeliness or anonymity.  In this town, things didn't come in threes, they came in scores, and the hilarity just never stopped.

            If there was one place in the entire world where Jason Stiles didn't fit in, this was it.

            _My turf now, _Luke thought, and he never once thought to ponder over whether he meant the diner or the woman.

            Luke was around the counter before Lorelai could turn around, blocking her view of the door and forming a none-too-small barrier between Jason and Lorelai.  He crossed his arms over his chest and tried out a glower, completely aware it looked like his normal countenance.

            "I need to speak with Lorelai," Jason said in the tones of a man accustomed to getting his way.  "If you could just step aside for a few moments, I promise it won't take a bit of your time."  He then had the gall—or poor luck—to hand Luke a dollar and add, "Here, I'll even buy a cup of coffee." 

            "You have got to be kidding me," Lorelai said loudly, not bothering to lower her voice.  She'd wanted a confrontation, really and truly, and if Digger freakin' Stiles was going to bring it to her—well, she wasn't one to step down.  She slammed down her coffee cup and tilted her head back, appearing to address the ceiling.  "You never give up, do you?" she shouted, wondering if she were God's own personal form of amusement for the week.  What had happened to quietude and looking at Luke's lovely hands?

            "I don't have any coffee for you," Luke said, looking down at Jason and wondering why the guy just didn't give it up and shave.  "You know, I had a dog once who had that problem," Luke thought out loud, stroking his face and nodding to Jason's facial hair.  "A little motor oil cleared it right up."

            Jason's face blanched, then turned red.  "Lorelai, come on," he said plaintively, ducking his head and trying to look at her around Luke.  "Tell me you're not going to let the… the _diner guy _sit here and play bouncer."

            "You're right!" Lorelai exclaimed, standing up and physically wrenching Luke's arm out of its position so she could stand in front of Jason.  "I guess I'm just gonna have to kick your butt myself."  It sounded very, _very _tempting.  The guy couldn't take a hint.  But she had the sinking feeling that physically harming him would just make him revert to the playground, and he'd think she was trying to flirt with him.

            Dear _God, _had she really dated him for so long?

            And then she realized she'd stepped right under Luke's arm, effectively placing it over her shoulders.

            Luke had his arm around her.

            And for a moment (insane, she told herself, it's just insanity), she wanted to forget all about Jason and cuddle into that flannel, bury her nose in it and stay there.

            "Oh, for Pete's sake," she said, shoving Luke's arm off her and glaring at him even though she knew damned good and well it was her fault.  "Jason, I don't know how else to tell you, short of drawing up a legal document.  It's over."

            "It's circumstantial!" Jason exclaimed.  He'd spent too long thinking about it to let her talk him out of it.  No, he knew they'd only split up because of things around them, not because of any actual integral difference or emotional dearth.  "Listen, Lorelai, relationships should never break up because of circumstances or situational reactions.  It's all about core emotions."       

            Luke's expression was growing more and more incredulous by the moment.  Did this guy actually say the words "situational reactions" while talking about relationships? 

            "Situational reactions?" Lorelai asked, huffing and narrowing her eyes.  "Your reactions are, like, who you are, Jason.  If you react to a cop by slapping him, it doesn't matter if you're a career criminal or Zsa Zsa Gabor, you know?"

            That earned her looks from both men.

            "Legal document it is, then," Lorelai said, sighing.  She looked up at Luke then, trying to ignore the little thrill that went through her at the hard, combative look on her face.  She was losing her mind, but she had to admit it felt rather nice.  "All right, Bull, you can get back behind the bench again.  Calm down."  But Luke didn't budge.

            Jason looked first at Lorelai, pleadingly, then at Luke, comprehension—or as much of it as he could muster—dawning.  "Ohh.  So that's what's going on here."  He rolled his eyes.  "Lor, come on.  The diner guy?  Are you really feeling _that _rebellious?"

            And Luke did for the second time that day what had been nigh to unthinkable before.  He took a patron by the arm and steered him for the door; this time, however, he was a great deal less gentle. 

            After all, he'd at least liked Dean once upon a time.

            "Get your hands off me!" Jason sputtered, shocked.  "You can't manhandle me!  I have a right to be in here!"

            "I can manhandle you all I want, pal, and you know why?" Luke asked, opening the door, stepping them both through it, and giving Jason a shove.  "Because that's one of the advantages of being the diner guy.  If I ever need to be thrown out of Rotary, then it'll be your turn."

            Luke would be lying if he'd said he didn't feel at least _some_ pleasure when the idiot tripped over the curb.

            "Now I know what Jodi Foster felt like," Lorelai said, feeling wrung out.  She'd just wanted a cup of coffee, and some time with Luke.  It seemed even the simplest things in life—her daughter, her coffee, her best friend—had complicated themselves without much help from her.  "Maybe I should warn Ronald Reagan about Jason."

            Luke decided it wasn't the time to remind her of the former President's death, so he refilled her coffee instead.

            "You didn't have to do that," she said, rolling the cup between her hands.  It had made her feel… what?  Not conflicted.  No, in that fight, she'd have been clearly and completely on Luke's side.  Weak?  A little.  She hadn't needed a man to stick up for her since…

            Well, since ever.  The last time a man had stuck up for her had been when her father had tussled with Straub, and even he hadn't been defending her so much as he'd just been defending his own family's honor.

            "I do occasionally do things just to be nice," Luke snapped, setting clean plates on their racks with a hard _snap _of porcelain against porcelain.

            She looked miserable, big dark, circles under shifting eyes, occasional sighs.  And part of it was because of that _guy _he'd thrown out. 

            "I've been in your diner nearly every day for how many years?  I've never caused you to throw people out before."  She tilted her head.  "Except for that time Dad went into the hospital."  He didn't answer her, but began dumping sugar into canisters with a determined expression on his face.  "I always thought I loved living in a small town, but now…"

            It took his breath away, the simple act of leaving a sentence hanging as she had.  Was it to come to this again, then?  Lorelai taking Rachel's path and Rachel's defense?  That she couldn't live in a place where everyone could see and judge her every move?

            He couldn't take that again.  It was just… too much.  "Are you thinking about leaving?" he asked, choosing immediately the path he would take if he had to take it.  "If you need to go, I can take you."

            Lorelai stood, her mouth hanging open in what she knew was a completely unattractive and moronic gape, but she couldn't help it.  "Luke, come on.  That's ridiculous.  You love Stars Hollow.  This diner is your _life, _Luke.  Don't say things like that."  And that he'd follow her…

            Well, it should have been romantic, but was this what romance felt like, this giddy, heart-accelerating, confusing fear?

            She was afraid that _was _romance.

            "There is more to my life than this diner," Luke responded, wondering when she'd just get it already.  "And I do love Stars Hollow, but, Jesus, Lorelai, you know I—"

            _No, no, no, no, no… _she could _hear _the words he was about to say, and worse, she could feel everything within her leaping in response.  "I'm late for work," she said quickly, backing away from the counter and completely forgetting her purse.  "Thanksforthemuffins," she said in a rush, and she ran out the door.


	8. Brad Pitt, Boxers, and Lolita

CHAPTER EIGHT- **_Brad Pitt's Boxers and Lolita_**

             She hovered.

            She perched on the edge of the counter, leaned over shoulders, flitted from space to space in the already busy kitchen like an insect unsure of where to light.

            "Okay," Sookie breathed out, patting her hands palm-down in the air as though settling something imaginary.  "While you know I love to have your input—"

            "No, you don't," Lorelai put in, grabbing a blueberry and popping it into her mouth, hopping up on a counter and swinging her legs like an ornery five-year-old.

            "And I love your company—"

            "Yes, you do."

            "I can't have you back here," Sookie finished.  "Especially sitting on the counters and eating things I already had measured."  Here, Sookie smacked Lorelai's hands and then grabbed them, looking at her best friend imploringly.

            She'd have to have been blind or stupid not to realize all the things that Lorelai was going through.  Rory's departure had been three times what Lorelai could reasonably handle without missing a stride, and Sookie would eat her wooden spoon if there wasn't something else going on.

            Lorelai seemed to be doing her little getaway dance, but there was no one to get away from.  No one Sookie knew of, at least.

            "Honey, come on.  Tell me what's wrong."  Sookie drew Lorelai down off the counter and into the main lobby, where the midday had brought about a lull, and the only person nearby was Michel, talking incessantly on his tiny cell phone in one corner of the inn, occasionally making loud comments about how horrible reception was in small towns.

            "What do you mean, wrong?  Nothing's wrong," Lorelai answered, laughing a little.  "I'm here, and I'm awake, and we have customers.  Paying customers!  What more could be right?"

            "I don't know!" Sookie exclaimed.  "Why don't you tell me?"

            Lorelai drummed her finger on the front desk.  "Oh, oh!" she said, jumping up and down.  "I got it!  Brad Pitt could be… waiting in my house with a bubble bath drawn, wearing a pair of red silk boxers and holding a rose in his teeth."  She beamed at Sookie for a moment, the sparring match only slightly taking her mind off Luke's near-miss only moments before.  "Should I go check?  Did you arrange that for me?  You'll be my best friend forever."

            Rather than taking the bait, Sookie stroked a hand down Lorelai's arm, the friend part of her brain now warring with the chef part of her brain, which was worrying incessantly about the other kitchen staff and how they were faring without her.  There were a thousand things she wanted to say, a thousand and one.  She just couldn't pick which one to actually say.

            It turned out she didn't have to choose; Michel finally ended his phone call.  "Oh, look, how nice of you to join us.  This was left for you while you two were in the back, laughing and living it up while some of us were doing hard work and earning the money which we are paid to do our job.  Anonymously speaking, of course."  He handed Lorelai an envelope, stuck his nose even farther in the air, and sniffed.  "I am not, if you did not notice, a mail service."

            "I notice you're not a lot of things," Lorelai said, snatching the envelope away from him.  She held it in her hands for a moment, thinking nonsensically it might be from Rory, though she'd talked to her daughter early that morning.  Then she wondered about Jason, and a frown creased her brow as she wondered what on earth he'd sent her.  Her parents crossed her mind, and with a disgusted noise, Lorelai tore it open with the hopes that it was jury summons or anything more pleasant than a letter from Digger or Emily. 

            But there was no jury summons, no letter, only a photograph and one more tattered piece of notepaper that read _You__ didn't pay for your coffee.  _

            Lorelai ran her finger over the photograph, shocked that she'd forgotten about it after all this time, surprised that Luke had kept it, or made a copy of it.  They sat together at the Starlight Festival, bodies turned toward one another, heads tilted slightly in and down as though they were preparing to share a secret.  And perhaps they had been; who knew?  But they looked comfortable, and though she was reluctant to admit it, they looked good.

            "Damn it, Luke," Lorelai whispered, unmindful of Sookie and Michel.  "When did you get so good at this?"

            And though Michel, for once in his life, decided to exhibit some tact, smirking in a way that was uniquely his, Sookie's eyes popped wide and she began to squeal.

            "Ohmygodlorelai!" she spouted in one breath.  "Luke?"

            And in that moment, between best friends, there was no need for long explanations, rambles and references.  Lorelai felt herself needing to be honest, both with herself and Sookie, and so she simply smiled and said, "Luke."

            She threw herself into work, uncertain of what else to do.  She didn't feel she was being fair to Luke, to herself, but she didn't feel starting up a relationship at this crucial time in her daughter's life would be particularly fair to anyone, either.

            She needed to be three people—mother, friend, and woman—and she could only be just herself, Lorelai, and she was afraid she'd have to pick and choose rather than trying to be all three.

            But choosing or no, she found herself with money in hand to go pay for her coffee, and she'd stuck that damned picture on the refrigerator.

            "Next I'll doodle his name on my Trapper Keeper!" she crooned mockingly to herself, grabbing her purse and heading for the door.

            The phone stopped her in her tracks, and she squeaked "Rory!", leaping over the couch and snagging the phone off the floor, where it was lying beneath a three-year-old magazine.

            "Hello?  Hi?"

            "She _slept _with a married man.  No, no, no, let me be more specific.  She had _sex _with a married man.  Hell, she had sex, Lor!"  The miles of phone cables didn't matter; Lorelai could hear the shock, dismay, and anger in Christopher's voice clearly enough.

            "She _told _you?"  She fought off disappointment; Rory hadn't even told her, and God only knew if she'd been planning to in the first place.  If Rory had ever needed united parents in her life, this was the time. 

            "Your daughter—_our _daughter—is the most honest person the face of the planet.  Of course she told me.  She made it nearly twelve whole hours under the pretense of just being here to visit, then she cracked like a stock broker under the pressure of constant country music."  On his end of the phone, Christopher raked a hand through his hair, paused, raked it through his hair again, and blew out a breath.  He'd never felt so helpless in his entire life, and never so guilty.  "I'm coming out there, and I'm going to kill this guy," he decided, but he didn't sound too convinced.

            Was that was he was supposed to say?  He felt like he'd lost his script somewhere.

            Lorelai smiled sadly on her end, hearing clearly the conflict in his voice.  "I'm sorry, Chris.  She wanted to come out there."

            "I want her out here," he said firmly.  "God!  I just… I want to spank her," he burst out spontaneously, naming the first punishment he could think of.

            It certainly didn't sound effective when Lorelai began laughing at him, glad for the chance to lighten things up.  "Hold on there, Humbert Humbert," she snickered.  "Maybe you want to rephrase that, as our daughter passed spanking age a great long while ago, and because she's better behaved than her mother, she never got spankings."

            "I recall you getting some sp—"

            "Can it, Christopher.  What were you saying before you started chastising Lolita?"

            "I just… feel I ought to punish her.  I mean, dammit, Lorelai.  Can't we… lock her in a room or something while we take care of this guy?"  He felt sick, and altogether unready for this type of crisis.  His daughter, for God's sake, hadn't ever needed this guidance.  Hell, she'd always been more mature than he had.

            "Since when were you Mr. Morality?" Lorelai said defensively.  "It's not like you can just throw on the Daddy-pants now, Christopher.  She made a mistake, all right, she doesn't need punishment, she needs support.  She probably needed support a long time ago, and a few phone calls a week offer about as much support as a training bra."

            The silence that confronted her was rare from Christopher, and she knew she'd stung him.  For a long, tense moment, she wished she could just let him be stung and not say a word.  But it was too unlike her.

            "I'm sorry," she said, rubbing her eyes and knowing full well she wouldn't be able to go pay for her coffee tonight.  She'd thought she would have to choose, and her choice came right here.

            Once more, Christopher was taking precedence over Luke, and this time, Lorelai wasn't sure she liked it a single damned bit.

            "I just… it's been hard for me.  I'm her primary guardian," she said carefully, "And I feel like I failed."

            And when Christopher began to go on about what he should do, Lorelai sank to the couch and thought with a great deal of regret how sad it was her daughter had ended up with two parents who had the innate ability to make everything about themselves.


	9. Certainty

**Author's note: All my apologies for a few chapters ago, where I noticed some glaring typos that completely changed meanings of sentences. Work life writing= occasional typos. Thanks for continuing to read, however!**

CHAPTER NINE- **_Certainty_**

Luke Danes wasn't a man accustomed to regret, and it fit him poorly on the rare occasions he indulged himself in it. Thus, his mood was less than pleasant when he woke the morning after he'd very nearly opened his mouth and told Lorelai he loved her.

He considered himself a practical man, so he wasn't surprised at her absence the entire day and evening before, and he couldn't help but recall Rory's angry words to her mother the morning after she'd slept with Dean, the morning after he'd kissed Lorelai, the morning after everything had changed for everyone, it seemed.

_ "I don't find guys the way you do, Mom, I'm not the six-month commitment-phobe who knows she can replace the last guy with a new one. I don't expect you to understand what it's like to need someone to care about you, because you always have that." _

It was no less disturbing to hear it in memory than it had been to hear it the first time.

Of course she would run away from him, that was what she did. He'd always been a bit pleased to see her run before, because she'd been running away from someone else. But now it was a different matter entirely.

He laid his head to the well-tended tile of his shower and patiently waited for the hot water to ease the tension in his back.

It wasn't working.

He was different from all the man who had come before; he knew he _had _to be. He just didn't know how, exactly, or what he had to offer her that they hadn't already tried.

And since he was already regretting his actions of the day before, Luke figured he'd go right ahead and regret that he'd never done at least a _little _prying into her personal life all those times she'd sat at his counter, staring up at him with those damnable big blue eyes. God knew she was never exactly unwilling to talk; he'd just never wanted to hear it.

He was even more ill-suited to being jealous than he was to being regretful.

When the shower started to cool and neither his disposition nor tension had improved, he turned the shower off and sloughed water off his face with one large, not entirely steady hand.

He couldn't lose her, even if keeping her meant backing off.

He dressed with the ease of long-formed habit, grabbing the jeans, tee-shirt, and flannel shirt at random from their places in the closet and drawers, then he shoved his feet into his tennis shows and was on the move into the diner even as he rubbed a towel over his damp hair.

A shadow, thrown only faintly in the wavering, early a.m. light, passed in front of the diner door, then back again, and without a bit of forethought, Luke unlocked and opened the door, already leveling a chastisement at his dairy delivery man, who endlessly forgot the key.

And, as he'd done countless times in the past few days, Luke simply stared.

He didn't know how he possibly had it left in him to be surprised at any of her actions. Her long, pajama-clad legs carried her back and forth across his storefront, her eyes drooping with lost sleep and dearth of caffeine. In one hand, she carried a brown paper bag, and in the other, a wad of money. Any other time, it would have been on the tip of his tongue to tell her she looked like a misplaced wino, but here, now, he just wanted to gather her up and whisper "good morning" into the top of her head, into all that curly hair.

"I meant to come last night, but I got held up—"

"Sounds familiar," he said dryly, unable to help himself, unable to think straight, unable to quash the niggling, horribly uncomfortable jealousy that wanted to rear up and ask her what had come up.

But as usual, Lorelai would not be deterred once she'd chosen her course, and he braced himself for the inevitable barrage that did, indeed, follow.

"And I couldn't sleep because I felt like I'd stolen your coffee, and then there was that picture—I didn't k now you still had that picture, by the way, that was sneaky—and so I got money to pay for coffee for the rest of the month and for whatever else I took, and I drove to that 24-hour place over in Hartford and got the picture reprinted—did you know they sell 5th Avenue candy bars in there? I haven't seen one of those in years, and they sell those, but no coffee while you wait for your photo to print in one hour or less and while you shop for two picture frames to put your old picture and your new picture in—and so, here—" she shoved the bag into his hands, "And here," she handed him the money. "And were you getting ready to tell me you loved me?"

She wanted to wince, wanted to curse, but instead stared at him forthrightly, unwilling to show him any weakness. She'd meant to be cool, meant to be oh-so-casual, to turn the tables by offering him a framed copy of that damned photograph and sarcastically paying her coffee fines.

But then he'd come out rubbing that towel over his hair, his shoes unlaced, a few drops of water still clinging to his jaw, and her carefully prepared speech had plummeted to the bottom of her stomach.

And damn it all, she'd actually asked him about the L-word.

The hand moving the towel over his hair stopped, and he stared at her, his hand atop his head, his eyes narrowed.

"Not right this minute," he said, effectively skirting the question in a way… well, in a way Lorelai herself would have been proud of.

She'd have been damned proud of him if he'd been directing the diversion to anyone other than her.

"Yesterday," she said, giving a childish stamp of her foot. "Damn it, Luke, you… you come to the airport, you send me muffins, you throw Dean out, and then Jason, and then you offer to take me away, and…" She didn't know what he'd done next. Had he almost said it? Had she completely imagined it? She couldn't finish the sentence without knowing, and she wouldn't guess and make a fool of herself if she was wrong.

He shrugged then, sliding the towel over his shoulder, crossing his arms over his chest and regarding her in the foggy morning light. "What do you want me to do, huh? Finish my sentence now? Nuh-uh, lady, you walked out on it, I'm not gonna repeat myself."

But, oh, how he wanted to, just as badly as he wanted to pluck that picture out of the bag and take a good, long look at it.

"You can't just… _say_ things like that, Luke." Unable to look at him and that unwavering stare, she started to pace again, knowing what he was thinking—he hadn't actually _said _anything at all, she'd only assumed.

In the meanwhile, she hadn't asked for any coffee yet, and of the two of them, only Luke had noticed her uncharacteristic oversight.

He counted it as a point in his favor.

"You can't just decide that, because it's… insane." She'd spent the entire, sleepless night—picture or no picture—trying to carefully list the reasons why Luke couldn't love her.

Luke couldn't love her because Luke was Luke, and quite frankly, Luke was too good for her.

"Who says I decided anything?" he asked, predictably torturing her because he could, and he added, "You still haven't told me what we're talking about."

He was being sadistic, and he damn well knew it, but coming on the heels of the nearly debilitating fear that things were going to not only stop in their tracks but _move backward, _this was a little bit satisfying.

Seeing Lorelai scramble now was just as good as seeing her run into doors and waiters.

"You can't just kiss me and start this whole thing without… without me knowing what the hell's going on!" she finally shouted, throwing her hands in the air.

Cool sophistication had nothing on Lorelai Gilmore. Lorelai Gilmore had flat panic.

"So what the hell's going on?" Luke asked, gesturing widely with his own hands, the paper bag raising right, the money raising left, a few dimes slipping from between his fingers to hit the pavement.

"Right now, we're arguing about how insane you are, that's what the hell's going on!" she retorted, and before she had time to register anything else, he'd stepped into her, not touching her with those lovely hands, no, he kept those to his sides, but he kissed her as though he hadn't stopped kissing her on the porch, and the hell of it was, she kissed him right back, stepping into him until he was against the doorframe, his fingers clenching tightly into paper money and the paper bag, and this wasn't at all like kissing her on the porch of the Dragonfly, no, this was something else entirely.

That had been just a little slower, _that _had still possessed tentativeness.

This was absolutely certain, and both of them knew that with absolute certainty.

And then Kirk came along and ruined the whole damned thing again.

"Well, I was going to stake out my table, but I think this is much more interesting."


	10. A Friendly Wager

CHAPTER TEN- **_A Friendly Wager_**

Luke stepped back, away from Lorelai, her lower lip sliding just a bit between his as he pulled away, a bratty little sound of need purring in her throat.

Kirk said nothing, merely stared at the two of them, his hands in his pockets. Not even the glare Luke directed at him fazed him, though it was certainly well-earned—Kirk had, after all, interrupted this twice now.

Of course, Luke reasoned, if they'd been somewhere more private, they'd not have had any interruptions.

That particular realization sent his heart to the soles of his feet and back again in a spectacularly hard, blood-stirring bounce.

"Always glad to be the local entertainment," Lorelai finally spoke, her voice sounding faint. She glanced at Luke, then at Kirk, then settled for looking at her feet, one hand touching her lips lightly as though to reassure herself of what had happened.

Twice… no, three times, she reminded herself.

It had not only happened once. She'd kissed Luke three times, only this time had been in public, of a sort.

"Move along, Kirk," Luke said through clenched teeth. "The diner's not open for another hour and a half."

Kirk nodded as though Luke had given him something to consider rather than delivering an order. "Well, Luke, I appreciate your concern. Be that as it may," he said with the pretentious tone he'd borrowed liberally from Taylor, "When the town approved gambling in certain circumstances, they appointed me both collector and distributor of gains."

"Distributor of gains?" Lorelai asked even as Luke echoed "Gambling?"

"Only in certain situations," Kirk said. "And this fulfills… situation 7c., which was… the event I just witnessed. I think I'm going to make money on this one."

Luke grabbed Kirk by the shirt, pulling him closer.

"Careful with the shirt, my mom just ironed it!" Kirk exclaimed, his voice slipping into _whiny _straight from _pretentious. _

Lorelai laughed in disbelief, shoving a hand through her hair. Oh, she thought she'd let Luke talk.

For once, she was well and truly speechless.

"You mean to tell me the town approved _betting _on my love life?" Luke asked incredulously. "And you're the bookie?"

Lorelai felt her stomach flip-flop at the L-word and found she wasn't speechless after all. "I knew I shouldn't have skipped those few town meetings," she said, needing that one little stab at levity.

"Not just yours," Kirk said, and Luke thought he'd be damned if there wasn't a weird, smug, self-satisfied note to Kirk's voice. Like he'd been _waiting _to tell them this. "You and Lorelai."

Luke found, remarkably, he no longer had the strength to hold Kirk in place. It was just ridiculous enough to be believable. The sheer insanity of it had that fabulous Stars Hollow touch.

"So what were the other situations?" Lorelai asked, her curiosity getting the better of her. But she knew the answer even before it was given to her.

"There aren't actually any other situations," Kirk said, and now he sounded uncomfortable on top of smug as he hurriedly tried to tug the wrinkles out of his collar. "Come on, don't tell me you guys thought everyone didn't know about you two."

"Maybe we thought _we _didn't know," Lorelai said, turning big eyes to Luke.

She should be writing all this down, she thought, for when Rory returned.

Luke wanted to be mad, really he did, but another corner of his mind, the newfound, slightly conniving, completely confident part of him that had gone after Lorelai in the first place was rejoicing.

What Kirk was saying meant public exposure, and public exposure gave Lorelai Gilmore nowhere to run.

"Well, what are you standing here for?" he asked Lorelai. "People are going to start showing up for their money any minute." And before she could protest, he was tugging her back inside the diner and shutting the door to the sound of Kirk's celebratory whoop.

"What in the world are you doing?" Lorelai asked, pulling her arm away from him as he locked the door and double-checked the "Closed" sign. "We could have paid him, you know. Surely the pot's not _that _big."

"Ashamed of something?" he asked, crossing his arms over his chest and facing her down. She'd kept him on his toes for so many years, was it so wrong to want to turn the tables?

He figured she needed that now and again, and she'd be needing that for the rest of her life.

He didn't really intend to let anyone else give that to her.

"Asha—what? No!" Lorelai opened her mouth, chuffed out an indignant laugh, shut her mouth, opened it, then shut it again. "Damn! Where's Rod Serling when you need him?" She sat down in a chair, propped her head in her hand, and looked up at him. "You know, Twilight Zone? Black and white, with the—"

"I know Twilight Zone," Luke said, needing movement, needing something to keep him from kissing her again. This time he wanted answers, and this time she wasn't going anywhere. He figured they had five minutes, at most, before people started showing up. "I'm just waiting for you to answer my question."

"I'm not ashamed!" she exclaimed, throwing her hands in the air. "And if you're going to be like that, make me some damned coffee!"

It was downright domestic, Luke thought.

_Think, think, think, _she told herself, burying her face in her hands as she listened to the all-too-familiar sounds of Luke making coffee behind the counter. Had he ever made coffee in her house before? Odds were he had, but she didn't know if he actually _had _or not. And what did that matter? He'd done everything else in her house, from climbing into an unlocked window to repairing every last inch of the place.

He'd done _nearly _everything in her house.

With a tortured groan, she laid her head to the cool, clean surface of the table and wondered what the odds were of her waking up in her own bed if she let herself fall asleep right here.

_Taptaptaptaptap! _

"Luke, you have mice in your walls!" Lorelai yelled, her eyes still closed, her forehead to the table.

_Taptaptaptaptaptaptap!_

"I'm ignoring that!" she called loudly as Luke set a cup of coffee in front of her.

She wasn't looking up to see the small smile on his face, and she wasn't looking up to see Patty tapping on the glass with her fingernails, her eyes wide and shining.

"Lorelai, honey! We're so happy! Luke, will you open this door? I just made fifty dollars!"

Lorelai shot out one hand, closing it firmly around Luke's wrist and raising pleading eyes to his. "Luke Danes, please do not let them in. If you care about me at all…" __

He raised an eyebrow, and she judged that dangerous territory.

"If you value your own life," she amended, "Please don't let them in. I'm a desperate woman, Luke. I've had no coffee and no sleep. Would you taunt a desperate woman?"

"Desperate, huh?" he asked, turning his hand to rub his thumb over her wrist, to watch her eyes darken from bright to navy. "Well, I don't know if I'd _taunt _a desperate woman." He leaned down to her level, raised his eyes to the growing crowd outside the glass, and brushed his lips over hers once more. "Don't mind me," he said under his breath, eye to eye with her, grinning in a way Lorelai immediately recognized as dangerous. "But you said you weren't ashamed."

She wanted to scream, wanted to hit him, wanted to yell at the people outside, wanted to crawl in a hole. She wanted to retreat back to the couch she'd slept on only a few mornings ago, and she wanted to throw her coffee in Luke's face. She wanted to lean her forehead to his and laugh.

She wanted to sit somewhere quiet and think about what she was feeling for him.

She wanted to revel in what he felt for her.

And then her cell phone rang and Luke stood up, his thumbs tucked in his pockets, a completely uncharacteristic smile gracing that rough-and-tumble face.

"No cell phones," he exclaimed, jerking his thumb first at the sign and then at the door. "I'm afraid you'll have to take it outside."

Later— much, _much _later— Lorelai would consider it a lucky thing, indeed, that her frustrated yowl made as many people scatter as it did.


	11. Wild Monkeys

**CHAPTER ELEVEN– _Wild Monkeys_**

_**Author's Note: I'm really sorry about the delayed nature and shortness of this chapter. Real life sometimes attacks with a vengeance. For anyone still reading... voila. More soon, God willing.**_

"Hello? Hello?!" Even with her cell phone plastered to her ear, Lorelai couldn't hear a damned thing on the other end, principally because people were still banging on Luke's front door and calling after her.

There were people in housecoats and pajamas, flannel pants and sweatshirts, all states of attire, waving money and people pouting, presumably because they'd either bet wrongly or not bet at all. Lorelai stopped in her tracks, her mouth gaping open and the cell phone wavering a bit in her hand, when she saw Jackson counting money.

"Jackson, how dare you!" she said, reaching out with her free hand to snag him by the jacket.

"Mom!" Finally, Rory's voice, tinny but definitely there, burst through the cell phone and into Lorelai's ear. "Come on, I'm wastin' minutes here."

She honest to goodness felt as though she were slinking away as she started in the direction of the house, but she didn't feel guilty. It was Luke's damned fault anyway. "Rory, are you there?"

"Where else would I be?" her daughter noted dryly on the other end of the phone. "Oh, that's right. I would be in bed, if it weren't for my cell phone ringing."

"Your cell phone?" Belatedly, Lorelai realized she'd left a perfectly good, fresh cup of coffee—_Luke's _coffee, no less—sitting back in the diner. It would have been a perfect lubricant, a miracle fuel, for her powers of logic this morning. As it was, the sheer illogical progression of being kissed by Luke, kissing Luke back, and being assailed by townspeople with wagering problems had her head reeling.

"Babette just called my cell phone, Mother. _Babette._" Though she was trying very hard to hide it, Rory had found amusement all the way on the other side of the country—she'd just found it in the form of her mother back home.

It was the first thing she'd well and truly smiled about since her time with Dean.

"Babette called your cell phone. Got it. I'll tell her not to do that."

"It seems," Rory said, pacing across the guest room in her father's house, falling into her habit of parental lecturing, "You and Luke were caught kissing in the middle of town this morning."

"You have got to be kidding me." Lorelai let herself into her house and shot nasty looks at the walls. She'd spent a lot of time looking at those walls the night before. She didn't really want to see them now. They were mocking her.

Even the cats ordinarily hanging about the porch were gone.

With squinted eyes, Lorelai wedged the phone between her shoulder and her ear and struggled to separate a coffee filter, momentarily contemplating dumping the grounds straight into the top of the coffeemaker, and then wondering if she should just dump the grounds straight into her mouth. "I haven't had any sleep," she whined, hoping that would serve as an excuse.

"You know, I distinctly remember getting in trouble for not telling you when I kissed a boy in public." It stung, that memory, but it felt good to talk to her mother, to fall back into this rhythm.

She'd wanted to get away, but Rory very desperately missed her mother. She especially missed her at this particular moment, when the opportunity to mock Lorelai grew larger and larger with each passing moment.

"I'm sure somewhere in all your years, I told you to respect your elders," Lorelai moaned, pressing her forehead to the counter and listening to the sweet, ambrosial music of the coffee dripping into the pot.

She was starting to think it would be worth a few second-degree burns just to put her mouth right under the drip.

"I'm sure you did," Rory said indulgently. "Babette was really mad, Mom. I mean, if you'd held out just another week, you'd have made her a lot of money."

"I adopted you from a band of wild monkeys," Lorelai said, smacking her forehead once, twice, three times onto the cold counter.

"No you didn't. Okay, listen, I want to go back to bed, but first I want you to tell me what happened so I can have nightmares about my mom kissing the town grouch." The idea of Luke and her mother had grown on her over the years and even more so over the past few days, but she wasn't about to tell her mother that. After all, Lorelai freaked out enough when she thought she might be getting serious—if she knew someone else thought she was getting serious, she'd definitely back off.

"Luke's having a mental breakdown and he attacked me with his lips in front of the diner. We're checking him into Bedlam now." Lorelai fumbled a mug, hoped it was clean, and filled it with coffee, sipping it from the cup even as she poured, hissing and wagging her tongue when she burned herself.

Heaven. Heaven would be filled with coffee.

Hell would be filled with herbal tea.

"Mmm-hmm," Rory said, wincing as Lorelai slurped on the other end. She wavered between making a very big deal and playing it down, then made a noncommittal noise. "Well, it'll all blow over. Small town, everyone's looking for a scandal. This at least takes the spotlight off of... other things." She hadn't yet gotten up the nerve to ask her mother if anyone had found out about Dean, if Dean had told Lindsey, if her guilt had somehow been branded on her house in a big red A for everyone to see.

"That it does," Lorelai said, holding the mug between her hands, suddenly sober and very much awake. How could she have forgotten Dean's outburst in the diner? "Well," she said, trying out a chuckle, "If it'll help my little girl, I'll strip naked in the town square. But Kirk already did that, so I think that's old hat."

Rory put her fingers to the phone with a faint smile, knowing a reassuring hug and cuddle were on the other end of that phone, and knowing just as well she needed to make her own way for this one. "I'm going back to bed, Mom." She had made some decisions in the past twenty-four hours, but it wasn't time to tell Lorelai.

There was always time.

"Tell Luke I said hi, okay? Ask him if this means I get free coffee."

She was still chuckling when Lorelai hung up on her.

Lorelai stared at her coffee, no longer wanting it. For the first few moments of silence in the house, she couldn't figure out what had her so disconsolate. No matter how bizarre the actions of the residents of Stars Hollow, it was not their behavior that had her so concerned.

Only when she laid down on the couch, pulling an afghan over her, did it strike Lorelai what she'd done.

She'd been flippant with her daughter, her closest friend, about Luke. She'd avoided the truth, and even though she knew Rory had heard the facts—or some version of them—from Babette, it made her distinctly uncomfortable.

She didn't _want _to lie about Luke. Not to her daughter, not to her friends, not to her parents.

Not to herself.

- - - - -

He'd followed what she was saying that morning—Luke thought he was probably one of the select few people in the entire world who understood Lorelai when she was in mid-rant—but it still surprised him to draw the photograph out of the bag, to see that she'd taken the time to copy and frame the picture.

Luke wasn't going to be the one to tell her he'd already made his own copy.

He sat behind the counter, sipping a cup of tea with a small smile on his face, anticipating a big day of business ahead.

After all, there were dozens of people standing in front of his store, and there seemed to be plenty of money changing hands.

It was only an added bonus that people were standing on the sidewalk in front of Taylor's, undoubtedly getting in the way and making things a mess for Taylor.

Served the meddling old coot right, Luke judged, setting the cup aside and moving to turn his sign to "Open."

On any other day, Luke Danes did not want to answer questions. In fact, on any other day, Luke Danes didn't want to talk at all.

But as the morning crowd—greatly expanded, he noted—poured into his doors, clamoring for information, some waving newly-made money around, he was ready to answer whatever questions they had.

He just wondered who would answer his.


End file.
